In last week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we told you about the new PureFlex Solution for IBM i bundle that Big Blue rolled out as part of the October announcements. This bundle is based on the Power7+ processor and the p260+ two-socket server node in the PureFlex system and is a more suitable setup than a similar bundle announced in June using the quad-socket p460 node, which is based on the Power7 chip. Just how good of a deal is this new bundle?

The machines cost about the same on the hardware front. The p460 bundle had a

The fourth quarter is well under way and everyone now knows that Power8 systems are not going to start rolling out until the middle of 2014 or so. And this means IBM has to do some wheeling and dealing, particularly at the high-end where the Power7-based Power 795 machines are looking a little long in the tooth. This is because IBM did not provide a Power7+ bump at the high end of the Power Systems line in late 2012 or early 2013, and it has no plans to, either.

IBM generally does not provide a “plus” bump to its high-end

Your entire career has played out in the programmable era of computing. That’s not likely to be the case for young IT professionals with recently launched careers, as new trails are being blazed into cognitive computing. Leading the way is IBM‘s most famous computer, the Jeopardy!-winning supercomputer that goes by the name Watson. But Watson’s Jeopardy! fame was just the beginning of things to come. And if that’s all you know, you have some catching up to do.

“The next 20 years will change computing as we know it today,” says the person chosen to guide Watson development.

Of all the relationships we have, few will ever be as demanding, tumultuous, frustrating, worrisome, aggravating, and full of unrequited longing as our relationship with money. Money is a stern and demanding mistress. It leaves you spent and always wanting more. We chase it for a lifetime, but only ever catch enough to continue the chase. And those who catch more than their share, run even harder. It’s a primal force, an elemental attractor, and everyone would love to test the notion that money can’t buy happiness.

In that regard, IT professionals appear to have a leg up in the

IBM has introduced a new member of its Storwize family of storage arrays designed for use by small and midsized businesses, including those running IBM i on Power Systems. The Storwize V5000 sits happily in the “Goldilocks” zone between the V3700 and V7000 arrays, and provides some high-end features, such as support for IBM’s Easy Tier, Flash Copy, SAN Volume Controller (SVC), and remote mirroring for high availability.

The V5000 looks to have many features that will make it popular among IBM i shops. Anecdotal evidence indicates that IBM i shops are increasingly adopting storage arrays to get a handle

Seldom is heard an encouraging word about IBM Power Systems marketing. That’s the cold hard facts when you talk with the IBM i community. It’s an old complaint, much like the name change that remains a burr under the saddle of some folks. I’d like to see some i-specific marketing done to grow the market as much as any of the world-class complainers in the IBM i community, but this is quite obviously and assuredly not a IBM priority.

At the recent Enterprise2013 conference, I had a meeting with IBM’s vice president of worldwide marketing, Lisa Johnston, who reports directly

Arrow Electronics, known to the IBM i community because of its Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS) group that moves a ton of IBM gear, delivered its third quarter financial report that puts the overall company revenue at $5 billion. The ECS group contributed $1.6 billion to that amount. In addition to being a top IBM reseller, Arrow ECS also resells products for fifty of the largest IT companies in the world.

The overall company revenue showed no gain in revenue compared to the same quarter in 2012. The same was true for the ECS group.

Company executives provided some details

Just like companies using other platforms, big data is nothing new to IBM i shops, who are also struggling to keep up with their growing volume of data. This was demonstrated by the enhancements Big Blue promises to deliver this month with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 7 (TR7), which we told you about last month in The Four Hundred.

So when IDC released the latest results from its Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker on enterprise software growth, we were not surprised to see that big data played a role in determining which companies saw growth in the first six

IBM launched its SmartCloud Enterprise infrastructure cloud service back in the spring of 2011, and it was at that time five years behind industry juggernaut Amazon Web Services. In part to make good on its promises to grow cloud revenues and in part to get a broader set of customers and technologies, IBM bought cloud provider SoftLayer in June. And now it is warning customers that they will have to move to SoftLayer clouds.

The rumors about the transition from SmartCloud Enterprise to SoftLayer popped up late last week after some industry analysts caught wind of the forced–and entirely expected–migration

The new Storwize V5000 arrays were just announced, as we reported elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred, and IBM is already tweaking the prices on disk and flash drives for the machines. IBM has also cut prices on disks and SSDs for its V7000 arrays and for SSDs used in the SAN Volume Controller and the Flex System V7000 array.

The price cuts were revealed in announcement letter 313-103. As usual, I have plowed through the IBM Sales Manual to figure out what features are affected by the price changes:

IBM did not cut prices on